Apple, Vampire Wine, Stoli, Kopimi: Intellectual Property

Aug. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc. asked a U.S. appeals
court to force Samsung Electronics Co. stop using unique
features and designs of the iPhone that were found by a federal
jury last year to be infringed.

“Apple spent five years and $5 billion to develop a
product and it was a revolutionary product,” Apple lawyer
William Lee of WilmerHale in Boston said Aug. 9 “Samsung said,
‘We can copy it easily.’ They spent three months to bring a
product to market.”

Apple is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal
Circuit in Washington, which specializes in patent law, to
overturn an order letting Samsung continue selling products that
a California federal jury said infringed Apple patents. The jury
awarded $1 billion in compensation, although part of the damages
must be retried. Samsung, which denies infringing the patents,
said there was no link between Apple’s patented ideas and any
lost market share.

“Apple had suffered lost sales, but what was missing was a
causal nexus to those lost sales,” Samsung lawyer Kathleen
Sullivan of Quinn Emanuel in New York told the court. Apple
needed to show “the difference between Samsung’s infringement
and Samsung’s legitimate competition.”

The appeals court isn’t expected to rule in the case for
several months. The hearing came hours before the U.S.
International Trade Commission, also in Washington, issued a
ruling banning imports of some Samsung products based on
allegations they infringe other Apple patents.

In both cases, Samsung has said it designed around the
patents, so any loss would have minimal impact on the company’s
sales. The Suwon, South Korea-based company and Apple together
make almost half of all smartphones sold, with Samsung holding
the title of world’s biggest and the two companies vying to be
No. 1 in the U.S.

Apple, based in Cupertino, California, is trying to force
Samsung to change or stop selling some smartphones and tablet
computers. The $1 billion verdict it won at trial last year
equals less than two weeks’ worth of iPhone sales and one-seventh of Samsung’s second-quarter profit.

Trademark

Winery Sues Distributor Over Use of Vampire-Related Wine Labels

The dispute involves vampire-related brands for wine. TI
said in its pleadings that “for many years’” it has marketed
wines under the names “Vampire,” “Dracula,” Chateau Du
Vampire,’’ and “Vampire Vineyards,” It sells another wine
called “Dracula’s Blood.”

According to the complaint filed Aug. 6 in federal court in
Los Angeles, all of these brands are trademarks registered with
the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

In 2012 TI said its sales director presented its Dracula’s
Blood wine to Terra Firma USA Inc., and its principal Christian
Soare with an eye to persuading that company to distribute it.
The St. Louis-based distributor rejected the sales pitch, saying
the company “did not want to sell a Halloween wine,” TI said
in the complaint.

TI said that it recently learned that Terra Firma is now
selling a wine labeled “Dracula’s Bloodlust,” and has been
doing so since 2010.

This label confuses customers and infringes TI’s marks, the
company claims. It also said in court papers that while it sells
“great wines with great looking labels” that sell for $35 per
bottle, the defendant’s Dracula’s Bloodlust “has a garish label
and is a cheap wine that comes from a region that to most people
has a reputation for making poor quality wines.”

Terra Firma, whose website lists it as a distributor of
Romanian wines, didn’t respond immediately to an e-mailed
request for comment.

TI asked the court to bar Terra Firma from using any
Dracula or Vampire-related names on its wines or their packaging
and promotion. TI also seeks awards of money damages, litigation
costs and attorney fees.

The case is TI Beverage Group Ltd v. Terra Firma USA Inc.,
2:13-cv-05685-JFW-E, U.S. District Court, Central District of
California (Los Angeles).

A lower court properly dismissed the Russian companies’
ownership claims, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York ruled
Aug. 5. The trial court said that although a Russian government
decree authorized FTE to sue to protect the marks on that
country’s behalf, the company didn’t qualify as the government’s
legal representative.

That court said that FTE had failed to present plausible
facts supporting its claim that it was necessary to pursue the
case in its own name or that the Russian government was unable
to appear on its own behalf.

The appeals court agreed, holding that under U.S. trademark
law, a “legal representative” entitled to bring a suit must
demonstrate both its legal authority to represent the owner, and
that the trademark owner is legally incapable of representing
itself.

SPI Group, the Luxembourg-based distributor of Stolichnaya
in the U.S. has recently tried to disassociate itself from
Russia, in the wake of the country’s recently-enacted laws on
homosexuality.

Gay bars from West Hollywood, California, to Manhattan have
symbolically dumped their Stoli vodka to protest the laws, put
in place as the nation prepares to host the 2014 Winter Olympic
Games. The statutes impose fines on people who “propagate”
homosexuality, and last month, Russian President Vladimir
Putin’s government detained dozens of people following a gay-pride parade in St. Petersburg.

Val Mendeleev, chief executive officer of Luxembourg-based
SPI Group, said in a phone interview July 30 that the “Russian
government has no ownership interest or control over the Stoli
brand that is privately owned by SPI Group” and that its Stoli
vodka is made in Latvia. Additionally, Mendeleev said the
company doesn’t want to be “unfairly associated” with “the
shameful laws of the Russian government and the resulting
violence” related to its stance on gays.

His company, which sells Stoli in more than 100 countries
including the U.S., U.K. and Canada, has had a contentious
relationship with the Russian government over the rights to the
Stolichnaya trademark and is a defendant in this suit.

The case is Federal Treasury Enterprise Sojuzplodoimport v.
SPI Spirits Ltd, 11-4109, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second
Circuit.

Trade Secrets/Industrial Espionage

Eaton Goes to Mississippi High Court in Bid to Revive Suit

The Cleveland-based company was appealing a 2011 dismissal
of the case by Mississippi’s Hinds County Circuit Court.

The suit involved the alleged theft of Eaton’s trade
secrets by five engineers who took them to the company now known
as the Triumph Actuation Systems unit of Triumph Group Inc. of
Wayne, Pennsylvania.

The trial court cited improprieties by a former judge, a
former lawyer, and Eaton itself in dismissing the case.

Eaton said in its filing with the high court that its trade
secrets claims were backed by federal bill of particulars that
ran to more than 50 pages. These claims were improperly
dismissed by the trial court as a sanction for fraud on the
court, Eaton claims.

Eaton had secretly hired a lawyer with close ties to a
judge who presided over the earlier part of the litigation,
Bobby DeLaughter, best known for successfully trying the
murderer of civil rights leader Medger Evers when he was a
prosecutor. DeLaughter pleaded guilty to federal obstruction of
justice charges in 2009.

In its filings with the state supreme court, Eaton said a
ruling by DeLaughter later faulted by another judge actually was
favorable to the defendant in the suit, and that the defendant
suffered no prejudice to its case.

Eaton also argued that it didn’t commit fraud on the court
by hiring the attorney who previously had a close connection to
DeLaughter. The lawyer was retained for legitimate purposes and
did legitimate work, Eaton said in its filings.

In August 2012, a federal securities case was brought
against Eaton in federal court in Cleveland on behalf of
stockholders in the company. That suit alleged Eaton officials
offered false and misleading statements about their alleged
involvement in a scheme to influence the trade secrets case.

That case was dismissed Aug. 9 for failure to state a
claim.

That case is Florida Carpenters Regional Council Pension
Plan v. Eaton Corp, 1:12-cv-02001-PAG, U.S. District Court,
Northern District of Ohio (Cleveland).

Copyright

Russian Copyright Law Opponents Try to Register as Religion

Russian opponents of copyright laws are applying to
register their movement as a church in that country, the RT
English-language Russian news service reported.

Pavel Rassudov, chairman of the Russian Pirate Party, said
copyright laws “insult” the religious feelings of the
believers in the new religion, known as Kopimi, RT reported.

Kopimi, which has already been officially registered as a
religion in Sweden, holds that the Internet is sacred and that
copying and sharing information is morally justified, according
to RT.

Russian law permits the registration as a religious group a
legal entity of at least 10 people that has 15 years of proven
existence, RT reported.

Louisville Resident Says He Stole Shirts Because they Infringed

A Louisville, Kentucky, graffiti artist who claimed he took
shirts from a store because they infringed his copyrights was
charged with theft, the Courier-Journal newspaper reported.

The shirts were printed with an image of a graffiti tag
that has been sprayed on the store, according to the newspaper.

Philip G. Rodriguez claimed the rights to the “BRR” tag,
which has been placed on “hundred” of sites in the city,
according to the Courier-Journal.

News of the arrest and expressions of support for Rodriguez
is being spread through the use of Twitter Inc.’s social media
site under the hashtag “#freebrr,” the newspaper reported.

Swedish Pirate Party Claims Anti-Piracy Minister is Infringer

Sweden’s Pirate Party has reported that nation’s
information-technology minister to the police for infringing
copyright laws, the TorrentFreak anti-copyright news website
reported.

Anna-Karin Hatt, who has taken a strong anti-piracy stance,
was reported for allegedly posting Calvin & Hobbs cartoons, and
artwork for several movies in her Instagram account, according
to TorrentFreak.

Torbjorn Wester, the Swedish Pirate Party’s legislative
spokesman, said that reporting the minister was intended to show
that the nation’s copyright law “wasn’t working,” rather than
to cause the government minister legal trouble, TorrentFreak
reported.

The law to which Wester was referring is the Intellectual
Property Rights Enforcement Directive, which authorized large
fines and potential imprisonment for violators, the news website
reported.